Video: Batch renaming with Bridge

One of the perennial problems with file-based cameras is that the file names themselves are rarely very helpful. If I select one of these clips, this is just the kind of thing you'd get from DSLR camera. You can see that well, I've got a fair good of metadata here. I can tell the file size, the dimensions. Let me see now, I've got the frame rate listed here and the width and height and so on. Perhaps, if I view this as a list, we can see there's no color profile attached stuff like that. But the file name itself is particularly unhelpful.

One of the great strengths of the Adobe Creative Suite Production Premium 6 is the seamless integration between the various applications. Even so, the best-practice approach to sharing media and creative work between applications remains mysterious to many users. In this course filmmaker and author Maxim Jago breaks everything down into simple, clear steps, offering guidance on project and file management and examples that demonstrate the best use of the technology. If you use Adobe Creative Suite CS6 for video post-production, this course can make your work faster, easier, and more efficient.

Topics include:

Improving speech-to-text analysis with Story

Organizing projects in Prelude

Batch renaming with Bridge

Preparing images for video in Illustrator

Working with Photoshop files in Premiere Pro

Round-tripping a soundtrack from Premiere Pro to Audition and back again

Batch renaming with Bridge

One of the perennial problems with file-based cameras is that the file names themselves are rarely very helpful. If I select one of these clips, this is just the kind of thing you'd get from DSLR camera. You can see that well, I've got a fair good of metadata here. I can tell the file size, the dimensions. Let me see now, I've got the frame rate listed here and the width and height and so on. Perhaps, if I view this as a list, we can see there's no color profile attached stuff like that. But the file name itself is particularly unhelpful.

And when you're working with a non-linear editing system, it's commonly the file name that becomes the clip name. And then the clip name is what you're using to cut with. So, Adobe Bridge has a really nice feature that you might have encountered if you're a photographer and it works absolutely fine for the media file types that bridge can browse. And I can can browse because Bridge won't be able to display to you, what I would call fragmented file types. That means things like P2, stuff from a DVC Pro camera, things from an XD Canon camera, it just doesn't work with those formats.

But it's great for things like DSLR media. I'm going to just press Ctrl+A or Cmd+A to select all of these clips. And I can now either right-click and choose Batch Rename, or I can go to the tools menu and choose Batch Rename there. There's also a keyboard shortcut, Cmd+Shift+R on a Mac and Ctrl+Shift+R on a PC. Let me just pull this on screen so you can see it. There we go. Now, it's pretty, pretty difficult to fit this right the way on. You're not missing anything from the interface there, its just the bottom edges of the screen.

We've got this wonderful interface, I can choose pretty much anything I want to be assigned as a file name. Let me just clean up the display a little bit here so you can see. Here we go. So first of all, I can have presets. That's pretty straightforward. I can specify destination folders. So if I want, I can actually move these clips to a new folder when the renaming is complete. So, I'm building up a set of assets that I've selected and pre-named. Or I can rename them where they are, or I can copy them to another folder.

I don't suppose you need me to explain what each of those options do. But this is where it gets really interesting. I can assign any amount of complex, new file names based on the set of rules in this box. I know that the box isn't super clear, but you can see there's kind of an embossed line around this section of the interface. First of all, do I want this to take the folder name? Do I want to use some specific text? Maybe I'll say this is going to be Batch 001. Do I want the date and time information? And what date and time information do I want? I want it to be the date that the file was created, when it was modified, today's date, whatever you like. If you're going to have, for example, the date that the file was created. How do you want it? Do you want it years, months, and days or do you want it to be months, days, and years? You choose. Notice here, I've got another text field.

This is exactly the same as the one up here. So, the box on the left is the type of information you want. The second box here is the particular information you're choosing, and then if there is a third box, it's the formatting for it. So here, I'm going to have the folder name that the files are in, and its original form, followed by Batch 001, followed by the date and time it was created. Then maybe say this is select, and then we can have an automated sequence number for each clip. So, the first one's going to be a 1, and then we can have this up to, well however many digits we want.

I suppose I'm being vague here about what the selection should be because this is totally down to your preference. However, you want to identify your media before you bring it into the edit. This is a, a preparation phase for your media. This isn't something you would do partway through the edit. It's totally down to your preference. And notice down here, we've got this option, Preserve Current Full Name in XMP Metadata. This is great because of course, there is a file name right now. You can see in the background here, NVI0593, and so on and so on.

If you tick this box, then Bridge will incorporate that original file name in the XMP metadata for the file. And that'll be searchable inside applications like Premiere Pro. So, you're not losing the original file name just in case you need it for a reference. I would always tick this box. Under this option, we've got a Compatibility option, a series of tick boxes for compatibility. And these tick boxes just make sure that the file names you're going to create are compatible with those operating systems. Different operating systems have different rule for the file name. Micro S for example, will allow you to incorporate more of those special characters, like apostrophes, for example, that than Windows will. Tick all the boxes and you can be certain that the file names you create will fit and will work on every operating system.

So, I would just say tick the boxes just to be on the safe side. Now we're all set. We would just click Rename. Of course, I've got this set to move to another folder and I haven't browsed and specified a folder. If I say to Rename in the same folder and click Rename, it's going to update and replace the names for these files. In fact, I might as well do that. I'm, I'm not going to incorporate these files in with the other assets because they're huge and all you're seeing here is renaming. But you can see what's going on here.

I've renamed each of these, and they're now called Unused, which was the name of the folder they're in. And then we've got, each of the bits of data that I assigned. And it's a bit of gobbledygook because if I thought I had a little bit, I might have incorporated a few more underscores in there. I've got the batch series 001. And then there's the date that the items were created, and then the SLES text, and so on. Ending in 0001, and then 2, and then 3. And the reason its got three leading zeros is because if I just go back in there for a second, you can see I specified that they should always be four digits.

I'd advise against going for one digit, go for at least three. Because it's important to have the leading zeroes to make it possible for you to sort things in the correct order. If you don't have the leading zeros, you'll tend to find that things jump out of orders when you go into double digits, for example. Increasingly, we're seeing these kinds of preparation work flows being relevant to post production. Well, they kind of went away for a bit. Years ago we had them a lot, now they're coming back. We've now got valuable workflows in Bridge where we can tag and identify our media.

We've got Prelude to organize rough cuts and to pre-structure our project. And we've even got Adobe SpeedGrade to pre-prepare and do a basic grade on the media before we get into the edit. If you're used to a different curve for your post-production, where I suppose the complexity builds up over time as you go through the edit, this may seem a little bit strange. But it does save you a lot of time and effort later on if you do this preparatory work at the very, very beginning of the process. So, that's battery naming under the tools menu inside of Adobe Bridge CS6.

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